Principal Data Engineer

Position Summary...

What you'll do...

Principal Engineer responsible for architecting scalable data systems processing billions of advertising and customer signals across real-time, near-real-time, micro-batch, and batch workloads.
Ensure low latency, high throughput, resilience, replayability, idempotency, and cost-efficient scaling.
Unify advertising data across campaigns, identity, audiences, measurement, optimization, CRM, and advertiser lifecycle.
Build reusable, configuration-driven, multi-tenant platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, governance, observability, privacy, and deployment patterns.
Modernize legacy pipelines for real-time optimization, reporting, activation, and ML.
Lead agentic data enablement spanning discovery, pipeline automation, monitoring, diagnostics, cost optimization, onboarding, recommendations, and secure, explainable production guardrails.
About the team:

Global AdTech and MarTech builds the data and decisioning platforms powering advertising across Walmart U.S., Sam’s Club, and international markets.
Connects identity, intent, audiences, campaigns, inventory, bidding, relevance, creative, transactions, attribution, and measurement at massive scale in real time.
Enables Sponsored Products, Display, CTV, offsite, social, and in-store advertising, plus reporting, targeting, activation, optimization, forecasting, recommendations, and advertiser analytics.
Operates platforms processing billions of events, ad requests, and tens of billions of bids daily.
Designs for throughput, latency, correctness, resilience, privacy, scalability, and cost efficiency.
Advances AI and agentic advertising through trusted, governed, reusable data foundations and decisioning capabilities.
What you'll do:

Lead the architecture of real-time, large-scale advertising and customer data platforms processing billions of signals with predictable latency, resilience, replayability, and cost efficiency. Define when workloads use streaming, near-real-time, micro-batch, or batch patterns while modernizing legacy pipelines. Provide technical leadership across the full advertising lifecycle, including events, identity, audiences, campaigns, measurement, optimization, CRM, and marketing data. Build reusable, multi-tenant, configuration-driven platforms with standardized schemas, contracts, observability, privacy, and deployment. Establish governed agentic data capabilities for discovery, pipeline creation, monitoring, diagnosis, optimization, onboarding, and AI-ready products, with production guardrails for security, reliability, explainability, safety, and measurable outcomes across global advertising businesses.
What you'll bring:

Deep expertise designing billion-scale, real-time and near-real-time distributed data systems using Spark, Flink, Kafka, streaming, orchestration, and compute/storage optimization.
Strong experience with GCP or equivalent cloud platforms, including BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataflow, Pub-Sub, Airflow, and modern data infrastructure.
Deep understanding of low-latency architectures at Scale, partitioning, backpressure, replay, consistency, fault tolerance, resilience, recovery, and cost efficiency.
Strong AdTech/MarTech expertise across retail media, bidding, targeting, identity, attribution, measurement, reporting, CTV, and privacy-safe collaboration is desirable.
Ability to connect real-time architecture decisions to campaign delivery, ROAS, reach, frequency, inventory utilization, and advertiser outcomes.
Proven Principal-level leadership shaping architecture, standards, strategic trade-offs, design reviews, and senior technical talent.

At Walmart, we offer competitive pay as well as performance-based bonus awards and other great benefits for a happier mind, body, and wallet. Health benefits include medical, vision and dental coverage. Financial benefits include 401(k), stock purchase and company-paid life insurance. Paid time off benefits include PTO (including sick leave), parental leave, family care leave, bereavement, jury duty, and voting. Other benefits include short-term and long-term disability, company discounts, Military Leave Pay, adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, and more. You will also receive PTO and/or PPTO that can be used for vacation, sick leave, holidays, or other purposes. The amount you receive depends on your job classification and length of employment. It will meet or exceed the requirements of paid sick leave laws, where applicable. For information about PTO, see https://one.walmart.com/notices. Live Better U is a Walmart-paid education benefit program for full-time and part-time associates in Walmart and Sam's Club facilities. Programs range from high school completion to bachelor's degrees, including English Language Learning and short-form certificates. Tuition, books, and fees are completely paid for by Walmart.
Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to a specific plan or program terms.
For information about benefits and eligibility, see One.Walmart.
The annual salary range for this position is $143,000.00 - $286,000.00 Additional compensation includes annual or quarterly performance bonuses. Additional compensation for certain positions may also include :
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Minimum Qualifications...

Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.

Option 1: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field. Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related field. Option 3: Master's degree in Computer Science and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related field.
4 years' experience in data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics.

Preferred Qualifications...

Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Data engineering, database engineering, business intelligence, or business analytics, ETL tools and working with large data sets in the cloud, Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field and 5 years' experience in software engineering or related field, We value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly. The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following Walmart’s accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.

Primary Location...

1275 Crossman Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1103, United States of America

Walmart and its subsidiaries are committed to maintaining a drug-free workplace and has a no tolerance policy regarding the use of illegal drugs and alcohol on the job. This policy applies to all employees and aims to create a safe and productive work environment.